Tuesday, September 4, 2018

John McCain's Final Vote

Everyone orchestrates their own funeral. You have to make arrangements. Will you be buried or cremated? The will is essentially a means by which one has a say in what’ll happen after one’s demise. But it’s rare that people want or care to have true agency in human affairs when they're gone. And this is what was so extraordinary about John McCain’s funeral in which the orchestration of speakers and events (his inviting former rivals like Obama to speak and his exclusion of Trump from the invitation list) was actually a political act. In the planning of his own funeral, McCain cast the ultimate absentee ballot. When you think about it, what's extraordinary is the extent to which he cared. While the average person wants to make sure his or her affairs are in order and that children, wives, parents and even favored charities are taken care of, few people give a hoot what the world is going to be like after they’re gone. In fact, the reality that you'll no longer be on earth at some point can temper your behavior while your still alive. Indeed, there are times in the course of life that this awareness can have a liberating effect on the way that people deal with those around them. Someday you’re not going to be here to tell them what to do. So why bother now? Whether or not McCain ever enjoyed the freedom deriving from such a realization while he was still on earth, he exhibited a preternatural desire to be a voting citizen in the life to come.

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.